Windy City Report and an Auction SCORE

Walker Martin has written another one of his great reports on the convention at Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention. You can read it over at the Mystery File blog here.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing a proposal to hopefully obtain a grant to help finance some research I want to conduct in New York City, writing the introduction to the new edition of LOVE STORY WRITER, Daisy Bacon’s how-to book on writing love stories that was originally published in 1954, and starting to compose my talk LOVE STORY MAGAZINE and the Other Love Pulps for PulpFest.

I also became the proud owner of 37 more issues of LOVE STORY, thanks to Jack Cullers who acted as my proxy at the Friday night and Saturday night auction at Windy City. Out of those 37, 11 are pre-1930, and the rest are from 1941 and mainly 1942. I know from a collector’s standpoint, the pre-1930 issues are of more value, but I’m just as excited over the post 1940 issues, and here’s why.

When you’re writing a book about a magazine, it helps to be able to get a feel for all of the different kinds of stories that appeared in the magazine. LOVE STORY standard format was to include six or seven short stories and at least one, usually two longer stories that were broken up into installments (“serials”) and spread out over four, or five, or six consecutive issues. Try compiling six consecutive issues of a 1940s fiction magazine together, and you see my dilemma. The result has been that, up until now, I only had complete runs of perhaps two or three serials even though I had over 100 issues in my collection. Now with another 27 added to the 1941-42 years, I have a much better chance of having more serials to read.

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5 thoughts on “Windy City Report and an Auction SCORE”

Laurie, I’m glad that Jack Cullers won those LOVE STORY pulps at the Windy City auction. I figured that they must be for you. I hope you get your grant for your research on the book. I’m looking forward to reading it.

James Madison University is hosting The 1st Annual Pulp Studies
Symposium: Sensational Scholarship. The symposium will be held October
7th and 8th, 2016. Nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, James Madison
University’s Special Collections hosts one of the finest publicly
accessible collections of pulp magazines in the United States, including
a recent acquisition of over eighty issues of Street and Smith’s romance
pulp Love Story.

There has been a recent explosion of scholarly interest in pulp
magazines and popular print culture. This conference builds upon
emerging scholarship in this exciting and expanding field. We are
currently looking for presentation proposals related to methodologies of
pulp scholarship, focusing on pulps from 1895 to 1955. We invite
proposals that can include discussions related to:

Proposals will be accepted through July 1, 2016. Please send proposals
to Dr. Brian Flota (flotabc@jmu.edu ). For more
information, please contact JMU Special Collections at 540-568-3612 orlibrary-special@jmu.edu

Hi Barry – Thanks for posting this! David Earle told me about about this yesterday. Very exciting, especially since it mentions the LOVE STORY issues. It does seem that there is a much more heightened interest in the study of pulp fiction magazines in academia. Long overdue.